So far, at least, the Bush administration isn’t saying. Bush himself, while acknowledging the possibility for “a vastly restructured national-security posture,” also insists, “It’s way too early-way too early-to get into that.” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who in February announced a five-year plan to cut U.S. force levels by 25 percent, is now hesitating to endorse further cuts; Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams says, “You can’t run the military as on today’s weather report.” In part, this go-slow approach reflects the difficulty of predicting events in Russia and the republics: despite the stunning failure of the August coup, many Soviet experts warn that further unrest, and even civil war, are still possible. And in part, the administration’s cautious silence is based on a recognition that precipitous action by the United States or its allies could unintentionally contribute to instability in what is still the second largest nuclear power. Says Stephen Meyer, a Soviet military expert at MIT, “Most of what we could do is harmful.”
Nonetheless, Bush may be contemplating a major announcement on the West’s relations with the new Soviet Union. Consultations with allied leaders are underway: British Prime Minister John Major recently met with Bush in Kennebunkport, and White House officials say that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand are coming to Washington in mid-September. Last week the White House announced that Bush will address the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 23-the kind of forum where a president might unveil a dramatic response to the second Russian revolution. Administration sources say national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft is ready to push for even deeper cuts in the two superpowers’ strategic nuclear arsenals: the recently signed START treaty, 10 tortuous years in the making, may be obsolete before it is ratified. Administration officials are tight-lipped about Bush’s speech to the United Nations, but one source told NEWSWEEK that “you would be safe to say nuclear [arms policy] has moved to the front burner.”
Both Bush and Boris Yeltsin are under enormous pressure to reduce military spending. The United States has spent approximately $1.5 trillion on the military over the past five years, a peacetime record for that length of time. Since at least half of that total was aimed at countering the Soviet military colossus, says Lawrence Korb, a former Department of Defense official, logic suggests that Bush could eventually cut the Pentagon budget in half. Some Democrats are now calling for exactly that and others are eagerly contemplating the best ways to divert the Reagan-era defense budget toward domestic needs. Sen. Bill Bradley, for example, says he wants to convert this “security dividend” into tax relief for the middle class.
Most analysts now agree that the Soviet military no longer threatens Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact is dead. Control of the Soviet Army is being split between the provisional central government in Moscow and the remaining republics. Yeltsin’s reformers are bent on purging the armed forces and the KGB of everyone who supported the coup. These purges, coupled with the probability that the armed forces will be downsized from about 3.8 million men to about 2 million men, essentially eliminate the new government’s ability to mount a conventional military offensive. The Soviet Navy, the Soviet Air Force and the Soviet strategic nuclear forces remain. But Pentagon experts are optimistic that Soviet citizens’ own demands for a better standard of living will force drastic cuts in Soviet military spending.
The fun part, for the Pentagon’s many critics on Capitol Hill, is figuring out how to cut, chop and slash a defense budget they have long described as bloated. There is a plethora of big-ticket targets: Star Wars, the B-2 bomber, the YF-22 Advanced Tactical Fighter and the Seawolf attack submarine. Big new bases overseas, like the $700 million Air Force complex at Crotone, Italy, could die on the planning boards. The U.S. Army garrison in Germany could eventually be brought home. Spending on intelligence-the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the separate intelligence-gathering operations of the military–could drop sharply from its current level, estimated at $30 billion. Indeed, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has filed an “End of the Cold War” bill that calls for abolishing the CIA altogether.
But downsizing the U.S. military will be no simple matter-and abolishing the CIA, in the view of many policymakers, could be a drastic mistake. Even assuming the Soviet military is no longer a global threat, the United States will almost certainly retain a leadership role in assuring world stability. That means maintaining a combination of military forces that can be deployed to deter-and, if necessary, win-regional conflicts almost anywhere in the world. It also means maintaining enough intelligence “assets” to identify threats to regional security-threats like Saddam Hussein. Rep. Bud Shuster, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says the end of the cold war may well make intelligence-gathering more important than ever. “If you’re just looking at the Soviet Union you can make a case that the intelligence budget should go down,” Shuster says. “But if you look at the rest of the world, you can make a case that the intelligence budget should go up.”
The radical changes in America’s global position are now igniting fundamental debate over the future of U.S. national-security policy. Cheney and Judge William Webster, the outgoing CIA director, are fighting a rear-guard action to defend their budgets against an army of impatient cost-cutters. The current Pentagon position is that the 25 percent cutbacks proposed by Cheney are enough, at least for the time being. Rep. Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says the big decisions are at least a year away and that the debate will begin in earnest when Congress addresses the 1993 defense budget. “I think we should wait until things settle down-say, at least two weeks without change,” Aspin jokes.
But even Aspin agrees that George Bush must seize the moment-that the abrupt and almost miraculous transformation of America’s old adversary has now set the stage for new breakthroughs in arms control. Indeed, the emergent consensus among many experts on U.S.-Soviet relations is that Bush should make Boris Yeltsin an offer he can’t refuse: U.S. and Western support for his fragile government in return for finally ending the malign legacy of what was known, through much of the cold war, as “mutually assured destruction.” To do that, Bush must conquer his innate caution and take large and complex risks-but to do otherwise is almost certainly less prudent in the long run.
